How the media discovered Ferguson

After several nights of intense community outrage over the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, it wasn’t until two Washington-based reporters from The Huffington Post and The Washington Post were arrested by heavily armed local police that the political class in D.C. and Jefferson City started paying attention.

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Days of Twitter dispatches and Instagram videos from the protesters themselves had done little to change police behavior. But Wednesday night, tweets and stories about the arrests of Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery and Huffington Post reporter Ryan Reilly, along with harassment of other journalists, got the mainstream media machine moving.

An important story — involving the shooting of an unarmed African-American man by a police officer, public anger over the lack of details from the police and a heavily armed response to protests — had become something that hit home to journalists.

And they got results. The next morning, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon had state officials take over policing of the community, to amazing effect: The police playbook toward the town’s security was rewritten overnight and the mood in Ferguson changed appreciably. Friday night, however, saw a chaotic situation with looting and riot police once again called onto West Florissant Street.

“Here in the United States of America, police should not be bullying or arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs and report to the American people on what they are seeing on the ground,” Obama said.

Lowery and Reilly acknowledged their arrests helped change the storyline.

“Any good reporter placed in a position that Ryan and I were in likely would have ended up in custody that day,” Lowery said in an interview in the very same McDonald’s where he was arrested on Wednesday night. “It’s a good thing that new and renewed attention has been brought to Ferguson because of our arrest.

“However, it is disappointing that it was our brief detention — as opposed to the unrest, police clashes and tear gases of Monday and Tuesday night — that finally caught the attention of the Beltway media,” he added.

“I believe the outcome would have been exactly the same for any other reporter that was facing the same situation that we did,” Reilly said. “Certainly the fact that the D.C. and reporter Twitter-world is so interconnected — that had a lot to do with the fact this got so much attention.”

But, he added about the arrest and the ensuing controversy: “This isn’t why I came down here.”

Social media interest in the event peaked on the night the reporters were arrested and other journalists were denied access to the site, threatened with arrest or chased off the scene by tear gas and riot police. According to Twitter analytics engine Topsy, the search term “Ferguson” got about 200,000 mentions Tuesday night. Wednesday night, there were nearly 700,000 mentions.

Ferguson has become a true media circus since the arrests — with reporters often outnumbering protesters during the daylight hours at the site of a burned-out gas station. Journalists continue to turn fast food restaurants into impromptu filing centers — buying power strips at the Family Dollar to keep their computers charged.

CNN’s Jake Tapper and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes have broadcast live from the site. Reporters from tiny A.M. radio stations or student journalists from nearby colleges mingled with national reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, POLITICO, The Associated Press and other media outlets. The Taiwanese company that produces animated versions of news events even dispatched a reporter to the scene.